Acer is betting that a growing number of businesses want serious AI horsepower sitting on a desk rather than rented by the hour in someone else’s data centre. Its new Veriton RI110 AI Mini Workstation is a compact Windows 11 Pro machine aimed at teams that want to run large language models, AI agents and creative workloads locally, while still using cloud resources when they make sense.
At its core is Intel’s Core Ultra X7 358H, paired with Intel Arc B390 integrated graphics, the same Panther Lake silicon Intel has been pushing into premium laptops this year. Acer pairs it with up to 96GB of LPDDR5X memory and up to 4TB of PCIe Gen 4 storage, and says the system can handle AI models of up to 120 billion parameters. That figure deserves context. Running a model that size on integrated graphics almost certainly depends on heavy quantization and the large unified memory pool, so real-world speed will matter far more than the headline number. Acer has not shared token throughput or benchmark data.
The more interesting angle is software. Acer is positioning the RI110 as an open platform for agentic AI, letting users install whichever agents they prefer, including its own Acer Qubi Claw. The company describes Qubi Claw as a one-click tool that runs automated workflows inside an isolated sandbox, with launch skills covering online research, travel itinerary planning and audio transcription with translation into text notes. Tasks can run on a schedule or on demand. Sandboxing is a sensible pitch given the security concerns around AI agents with system access, though how isolated that environment actually is remains something IT teams will want to verify.
Hardware expansion is where the RI110 stands apart from many mini PCs. It includes an OCuLink port, a direct PCIe 4.0 x4 link offering up to 64Gbps, which Acer says enables external GPUs and fast NVMe storage with lower latency than conventional connections. For comparison, Thunderbolt 4 tops out at 40Gbps. That gives buyers a realistic path to bolting on a discrete graphics card later, which could matter more for AI work than anything inside the chassis.
Rounding things out are Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, a fingerprint reader for secure sign-in and Copilot+ PC certification.
The RI110 enters an increasingly crowded space, competing against Nvidia’s DGX Spark and the wave of AMD Ryzen AI Max-based mini PCs offering up to 128GB of unified memory. Acer has yet to confirm pricing or regional availability, and those details will decide whether this compact Intel box is a genuine alternative or simply another entry in the local AI arms race.
